Exploring LGBT Issues in Strategic Communication with Theory and Research

Despite representing significant portions of the advertising, marketing, and public relations work force, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) community has largely been ignored by scholarly research in strategic communications. With the exception of case studies that document strategies that can be used to secure the LGBT consumer dollar, little has been done to understand the LGBT community’s experiences with strategic communications efforts. This edited volume fills this gap by sharing research on the impact and interaction of campaigns and programming from advertising, marketing, and public relations on internal (e.g., practitioners and employees) and external (e.g., consumers, activists) stakeholders from the LGBT community. Several chapters in this volume highlight a significant change in the focus of strategic communications that recognizes the long-term benefits of having legitimate partnerships; others, however, counter this optimistic trend by discussing the continued struggles of practitioners working in strategic communication and the LGBT community at large.

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Jacqueline Lambiase, Glenn Griffin, and Kartik Pashupati

In the mid-1990s, advertisers began using gay-vague images, in which mainstream scripts of a heteronormative world were subverted. Simply, gay-vague advertising may appeal to both gay and straight target markets by using coded visual messages for gay audiences that may not be noticed by straight people. Using multiple appeals contained in one image, brands exploit the excess of meaning in advertising to reach more people, a strategy that maintains a balance “between brand strategy—what the marketer intends—and brand community—the free appropriation of meaning by the market” (Schroeder & Zwick, 2004, p. 45). Lambiase and Reichert (2003) asserted that consumer researchers and visual rhetoricians should work broadly “to trace the discourse communities surrounding sexually oriented ads and their varieties of meanings” (p. 264). Contemporary masculine images are open to multiple interpretations because encoding images with gay “window dressing” provides crossover potential and shows the “flexibility inherent in marketspace bodily representations” (Schroeder & Zwick, 2004, p. 43).

T. Miller (2001) wrote that gay-vague advertisements “are designed to make queers feel special for being ‘in the know’ while not offending straights who are unable to read the codes” (p. 299). Advertising creators, however, downplay this intent. While Sam Shahid, the creative mind behind campaigns for Calvin Klein and Abercrombie & Fitch, admitted creating homoerotic advertising, he denied familiarity with the phrase, “gay vague,” and attributed its creation to gay journalists. Shahid believed that “each person sees (homoeroticism) in a...

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